Art Basel Hong Kong 2021

NUKAGA GALLERY is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2021.

We are delighted to present works by Saori Akutagawa and Yuki Katsura, two radical female artists who represent the dynamic creative transformation experienced by women in post-war Japan. In autumn of 2016, NUKAGA GALLERY hosted a group exhibition titled Demythifying Japanese Women Artists, featuring Yuki Katsura, Yayoi Kusama, Atsuko Tanaka, and Yuko Nasaka.

Since then, we have actively been hosting exhibitions of post-war female artists in efforts to highlight their avant-garde and unique artistic practices that have been long overlooked.

Born in 1924, Akutagawa studied vocal music at university, and began working with hand-dyed batik and oil painting as a self-taught artist in order to express herself while in a typically patriarchal marriage to a composer. In the 1950s Akutagawa gradually began exhibiting her work, using hand-dyed batik techniques which she pioneered to produce the Woman series, which evoked the inner cries of repressed women, and drew the attention of critics. Her Myths and Folktales series, launched in 1955, depicted epic battles between male and female deities in these narratives, in a manner that connected to relationships between men and women in her own time and the unbridgeable chasm between them. She also participated in group exhibitions with avantgarde contemporaries such as On Kawara and Yayoi Kusama, and was one of the most innovative artists of her day, but her freewheeling style was not influenced by art movements of the time. She lived in the US from 1959 to 1962 and returned to oil painting after returning to Japan, yet amid high expectations for even greater achievements, she died suddenly at the age of 42 in 1966. After her death, her work and talent were neglected for a long time, but in the 1990s Japanese public museums gradually began collecting her work, and since a major retrospective at multiple public museums in 2009, she has become one of the Japanese women artists considered most worthy of critical reappraisal.

Artist Yuki Katsura was born in 1913, half a generation before Akutagawa, and was one of the founding members and the only female member of Japan’s first avant-garde group, the Nika-kai offshoot Kyushitsu-kai (established 1938). In the pre-World War II era, during the 1930s, she produced caricatural works using meticulously detailed renderings and collage. She attached printed matter and fabric to surfaces, or arrayed corks so they seamlessly filled spaces. In some cases she mixed collage and detailed hand-rendering in a single work. In the late 1930s, she began introducing cartoon-like motifs into oil paintings to create black humorous works that satirized current social conditions. She maintained this stance after the war, creating comical and critical works while keeping a certain ironic distance from a rapidly changing society. She lived in the US and Europe between 1956 and 1961 and
was acquainted with Yves Klein, Sam Francis, and Mark Tobey. While living in the US, she began producing abstract works, which incorporated collaged washi paper, and she finally began giving her abstract creations arms and legs like living creatures. These works embody Katsura’s statement, “I always try to resist stereotypes and fixed ideas.” Until her death in 1991, she continued producing works that masquerade as plain and straightforward yet incite both critical thinking and laughter in various ways, and remained committed to disrupting conventional ways of thinking. While Katsura was a genuine pioneer in the avant-garde movement, her critical appraisal has just been begun. A major retrospective of her work was staged in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Both Akutagawa and Katsura were free and unrestrained in developing their own unique styles without bowing to authority in postwar Japan, where women working as artists were overwhelmingly disadvantaged. In this exhibition, we present Saori Akutagawa’s batik works and drawings, as well as Yuki Katsura’s large-scale work featuring her sharp humor.

★More Information ⇒ https://www.artbasel.com/hong-kong